THE English MP leaving the LibDem conference last week looked to the heavens and groaned at the typical Scottish weather.

He had just heard his leader, Nick Clegg, below, exhorting their hosts to abandon thoughts of independence.

The Deputy PM had told his Glasgow audience that Scotland's only salvation was a No vote next year, to preserve the history that put the Great in Britain.

Not much history around here, thought our MP, as he left the SECC and shrugged on a raincoat patented by Charles Macintosh, a chemist from this very city.

He hurried across a road which owes its surface to engineer John Loudon McAdam, of Ayr, and jumped into a taxi waiting to burn rubber invented by John Boyd Dunlop, a Dreghorn vet.

En route to his hotel he braved the rain to mail the last of his postcards, their adhesive stamps invented by Dundee printer John Chalmers, and then hid his PIN as he withdrew cash from an ATM, the brain-child of Paisley inventor James Goodfellow.

Many locals would have recognised our visitor's concern that these weird Scottish tenners might not be accepted down south, despite the Bank of England being founded by Dumfries banker William Paterson.

The descending gloom gave our MP no concerns for his flight south that night. He knew it would be on schedule thanks to the wonders of radar, as pioneered by Brechin physicist Robert Alexander Watson-Watt.

Back in his hotel room, the light from a bulb first developed by Dundee inventor James Bowman Lindsey helped him scan the Evening Times, which reported the end of a city family's burglary reign, the son having followed in his father's fingerprints, a technique developed by Beith physician Henry Faulds.

The MP switched on the TV, the invention of Helensburgh scientist John Logie Baird, but didn't fancy watching Paul McKenna's hypnotism, first pioneered by Kinross surgeon James Braid.

A news channel provided more interest, with the arrival off the Syrian coast of the US Navy, which was founded by John Paul Jones, of Kirkbean, Dumfries, and a new breakthrough in insulin, which was first isolated by Dunkeld biochemist John James Rickard Macleod.

Our MP put in his duty call to his Scots-born missus on a phone first invented by Edinburgh scientist Alexander Graham Bell, but was informed she was out with the kids on their bikes, as invented by Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a blacksmith from Thornhill, Dumfries.

He discounted the lunchtime soup still residing in his vacuum flask, the inspiration of Kincardine inventor James Dewar, and instead settled for a large glass of Scotland's world-renowned national drink from the fridge, first invented by Hamilton chemist William Cullen.

Despite his leader's inspiring oratory he sought divine LibDem intervention for the toils ahead, flipping open his Gideon's Bible, a translation authorised by King James VI of Scotland, but in doing so he upset his glass and cut his finger.

A call to room service produced a Weegie first-aider, who cheekily assured him he would live.

He would not require an anaesthetic, as discovered by Bathgate surgeon James Young Simpson, or a shot of penicillin, as discovered by Darvel biologist Alexander Fleming, so he was delighted not to see any hypodermic syringe, invented by Cupar physician Alexander Wood.

A wee plaster would suffice.

Sadly, it will take more than a sticking plaster to conceal Scotland's independence malaise.

Whatever happened to the pioneering nation that gave the world all that genius and so much more?

Have we become so subservient, so dependent after years of living under London rule that we are terrified even to consider the possibilities of taking our future in our own hands?

When you are talking about breaking up a contentious 300-year-old marriage there should be public passion, anger even, so where is it?

The suffocating negativity of the Better Together campaign, using the Union-dominated media to paint Scotland as an economic basket case, stifled any such passion at birth. We all know the UK government could clear up so much of the uncertainty, but why would they when that fear among voters plays into their hands.

All the onus is on the Yes campaign to find some passion and convince us they can offer at least the equal of the status quo. The devil you know, and all that.

Then again, maybe Alex Salmond wasn't so daft in choosing September 2014. The Coalition may have imploded by then and the Unionist parties will be too busy kicking lumps out one another in the run-up to the UK general election in May 2015.

Either way, Scots could take a lesson from for my late namesake, Sir David Stirling, from Lecropt in Perthshire, who founded the SAS.

Who Dares Wins, as Del Boy Salmond might say.